We are inviting everyone to participate in whatever way they would like and have the time and energy to do. There are several small tasks that can be completed to make it easier for those of us with more time and energy who will be carrying the heavy load of pulling all of this together into something coherent. As we count down to the product launch I’ll be sending out a daily contribution suggestions.
Today’s contribution suggestion is to add a link to your blog and the headless image you created at the beginning of the course, with a name we can attach.
* Do a live radio show on Friday 13th at 8.00pm GMT to launch our GIFAChrome Camera and to reflect on our Headless 13 experience.
* Create a collaborative story in the form of a website about our GIFAChrome Camera that incorporates as much of what we have created during this Headless 13 as we can – a final project assignment that we do together rather than individually. We’ve set up a couple of Google Docs to gauge interest and assist in the organization process.
Surfer Dudette had her last wipeout on Nov 18, 2013.
To ease my grief I wrote a poem (with Humpty Dumpty as my model) and produced the video Ode To Surfer Dudette in memoriam. Her tenure on my mantle and her guest starring roles in DS106 Daily Creates have come to an end.
Aloha `oe my poor little nalu wahini. A hui hou kakou.
Surfer Dudette in Hawaii courtesy of Cathleen Nardi
ODE TO SURFER DUDETTE
Surfer Dudette… a gift from her daughter Surfer Dudette… she surfed in the water DS106 projects and daily creates For creativity she highly rates Surfer Dudette… on the mantle she sat Surfer Dudette… from her perch she did SPLAT! With Rockylou’s Resources and Rockylou’s Spin We’ve made Surfer Dudette a star once again.
The Production:
The video was produced with doctored images in Photoshop Elements 12. The selection tool was used to pull Surfer Dudette from her perch on the DS106 Nordic Track. She was overexposed in the original photo, so I had to make adjustments with the brightness, contrast, hue, and the burn tool to adjust the color and darken her a bit. Lots and lots of fiddling around!
She was placed in various locations by adjusting her size and rotation. For some of the composite photos, like when my daughter is holding her in front of a 1986 Christmas tree, I needed to use the selection tool again to capture pieces of Jenny’s hands to make new layers that could go over the top of Surfer Dudette. (She was actually a gift from Jenny given to me only a few years ago after a trip to Florida.)
The circling birds were a great find in the animated effects that came with Adobe Premiere Elements 12, my video editing software.
Getting the text font, color, style etc. to look nice and consistent was a much bigger deal than it looks. I tried all sorts of versions before I settled on the one you see in the video.
The final video segment was from her first appearance in my stop motion video “Surf’s Up Dudette”.
Professional photographer Jonathan Worth has put out an invitation for anyone to take his photos of Cory Doctorow, activist for liberalizing copyright laws and proponent for Creative Commons, and remix them in anyway you like. They will then choose from the best remixes and share any profits with their co-creators.
This is a new experiment in public art, and a new way of thinking about digital media. Who could be a better figure than an author who releases all of his published works under creative commons license with an open invitation to remix?
This opportunity was presented to the DS106 participants for Remix/Mashup weeks, as well as turned into an assignment MashupAssignments1020. The process of creating these new images evolved through three versions and resulted in the creation by Rockylou Productions and a host of other co-creators as documented by Mariana Funes of the first GIFAChrome Camera with accompanying GIFAChrome DS106 Film.
Cory Doctorow GIFAChrome DS106 GIFStrip for Jonathan Worth post-photo remix invitation was co-created at Rockylou Productions.
And as part of the “rules” of the remix challenge, everything we create must be licensed under a creative commons license too. (Notice the CC license logo on the strip?) So no worry about patent infringement or licensing fees. Everyone is welcome to use this work and remix it for themselves. I’ve even included templates at the end of the post that you can download to make your own GIFAChrome image.
Another wonderful side of collaboration and co-creation is that you don’t have to do it all yourself. Others are there to support the evolution of the project at hand. While I’m covering the process below, Mariana brilliantly captured the contributors and expanded on the philosophical issues that can arise.
=> Check out the Storify collection of tweets and commentary from co-inventor Mariana Funes: “The Birth of an idea.”
This week I have been following and participating in DS106 Remix weeks. As usual, there have been unexpected surprises and reflections. I expected to learn the difference between a remix and a mashup, but never expected to change my mind about what it means to own an idea. – Mariana Funes
Using Photoshop CS5, each GIF was made in its own Photoshop file. Then the three image composites were combined into one larger canvas strip with one above the other as shown below.
Each GIF and/or image is stacked one atop the other to create an image strip.
I then placed a film strip template on top of everything. DJ BIrthday Dance GIFStrip will walk you through the process. With the first draft finished, I alerted the DS106 community on Twitter and our DS106 Google+ Community, asking for feedback to improve the image. This was after all to be a collaborative project.
Cory Doctorow GIFAChrome DS106 Image created from original images by Jonathan Worth
VERSION 2:
Adjusting the colored image:
I wasn’t happy with the final panel as colored, I learned how to use layer filters in Photoshop, thanks to a post by Alan Levine, and was able to apply hue/contrast and brightness adjustments to a single layer. I was pleased that it didn’t take me too long to approximate the color scheme of the first two panels.
Redesigning the film strip template:
Jonathan had joked about his disappointment with the rebate He was evidently accustomed to 120 film. What the heck was he talking about?
@Rockylou22@cogdog Ignore the dog – you can see the rebate on the contact sheet (there are no spool holes etc as its roll film)
I had to do a Wikipedia search to find out what a film “rebate” was (the stuff along the sides of the images that give the image number and film type) and that the film template I was using was for 35mm film. 120 film doesn’t have those little sprocket holes on the sides. [Learn more about the differences] I certainly wasn’t expecting a lesson on photographic film types for this assignment. But you never know what rabbit hole the DS106 Matrix will take you down.
I went back to Worth’s photos and found a collage of contact sheets that I used as examples to build the new frame template. The font used on the Kodak strip turned out to be pretty close to Century Gothic. That was easy. Alan Levine joining in the Twitter banter, suggested a DS106 film would be appropriate.
I had toyed with many names for my new invention. RockylouChrome was definitely out. It was clunky. Finally the light bulb turned on and GIFAChrome DS106 film was born.The GIFAChrome DS106 100 film obviously had to have a camera to be used in. With version two of the GIFStrip a new-to-the-world GIFAChrome camera was invented.
I was also watching and listening to the viewers of these new images, and several were concerned with the middle frame not “GIFfing”, and wondered if there was something wrong with the strip.
@Rockylou22 cool! was it an artistic choice to keep middle one still? or am I missing it? love the CC on the strip
What to do…. What to do…. What I considered an artistic statement by keeping the middle frame still was confusing to others, So I put my artistic ego aside and turned the middle frame into a 3D Wigglegram GIF. A technique I acquired this summer creating Rockin’ The Rocks in 3D. And with Alan Levine as my subject matter while completing this project.
I very carefully extracted Cory sitting in his comfy leather chair from the bookshelf background with the quick selection tool. I then had to use the clone tool and spot healing brush to rebuild some of the bookshelf and applied a blur filter to the entire background. This helps Cory’s image stand out even more. There were then three frames of Doctorow, each off-set slightly- roducing the GIFAChrome single image below.
Cory Doctorow GIFAChrome DS106 3D Wigglegram
The 3D wigglegram GIF looks better if it “wiggles” faster than the other GIFs I was using. To create this effect I made 12 animation frames for the entire GIF sequence at 0.06 seconds in duration. The top and bottom frames remained stationary for 6 frames each (a total of 0.24 sec) while the center frame rapidly oscillated at the 0.06 frame rate.
We were requested to save our files in the high resolution of the original images. At 3000ppi this resulted in a final Photoshop file of a whopping 1.4GB. Ouch! That’s huge. It’s amazing that my computer didn’t crash- just slowed down during processing. I was able to finally reduce the file size to “only” 670MB by deleting and merging some unnecessary layer.s If you’re interested you can download the whole thing here. All were created in Photoshop CS5.
Another fun aspect of DS106 being an open online course that attracts global participation is that you can go to bed at night (usually way past a healthy bedtime because you just “had” to finish one more thing on that project) and wake up in the morning to find a comment on your posted work, or better yet that someone(s) have delightfully riffed on your creation. DS106 Never Sleeps! Such was the case with my DJ at Stonehenge photo I originally created for ds106 daily create tdc669.
From Wikipedia: A flash mob (or flashmob)[1] is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression.[2][3][4] Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.[5][6][7][8][9]
Here’s what the ds106 flash mob created between 11/11/13 to 12/06/13:
Cathleen Nardi notices a rabbit hole appearing in a flash in the bottom left corner with a pair of ears just poking out.
Rochelle Lockridge coaxes the little white rabbit out of his hole.
The story is captured with the new GIFaKidChrome imager in development over at the GIFaChrome labs.
StoneHenge
DJ_StoneHenge
DJ-Stonehenge-mushrooms
DJ-Alice
DJ-Alice-MushSpin_500px
AliceDJ-MushSpin_Smoke_500px
AliceDJ-Mush-CCat-Smoke-Colin
AliceDJ-Mush-CCat-Smoke-Colin-CatPil_2
Alice in Wonderland with Rabbit Hole
GAKC-AliceDJ-Mush-CCat-Smoke-Colin-CatPil_Rabbit
You can witness the evolution of the composite image right here as it unfolds. I plan on updating this blog entry if it morphs further. And links are provided to the posts so you can follow the comments and story line as it develops. (Suggestion: By subscribing to comments on this post you can get the latest updates directly.)
Note: All of the image GIFs and layered .psd files are attached below so anyone can join in the fun. Most current Photoshop file can be downloaded here.
Original Photos and evolution of our ds106 flashmob collaboration:
Photo 1: Stonehenge – Feb 2010 photo taken by Rockylou
Photo 2: DJ opening toy train for his 2nd birthday (Aug 2013)
Nov 9, 2013 @7:57pm Minnesota, USA or 9:37am Hawaii or Nov 10 @12:37am Scotland
Photo 1 + Photo 2 + Rockylou’s sense of humor+ Photoshop CS5 => DJ at Stonehenge for ds106 daily create tdc669: “Take a photo of something very small and make it look big.”
Some little blonde girl gave DJ a mushroom while visiting Stonehenge. He took a bite of the lefthand side before we had a chance to stop him. This is the result. No need to worry though. He took another bite on the right hand side and was back to normal by the time we returned to the tour bus.
Let The Riffing Begin!
Nov 11, 2013 @12:14pm (6:14pm Scotland, 8:14am Hawaii )
It gets curiouser and curiouser with the addition of spinning mushrooms and a Cheshire Cat.
Riff 3: Rockylou riffs on the evolving creation by adding spinning mushrooms and a Cheshire Cat to enhance the Alice in Wonderland story line. Posted to ds106 Google+ Community
Rockylou couldn’t stand seeing the rogue white background flashing through on the spinning mushrooms and fixed it while creating a new clean .psd file adding Colin dog as its own layer.
Riff #5 edit: Rockylou cleaned up the spinning mushroom GIF and created new .psd file with individual layers in comment to Google+ Community
Screencast tutorial on adding Colin to the Photoshop file as a single layer.
Alan Levine’s “radioactive” turquoise caterpillar joins in. He’s last seen crawling up towards the mushroom patch in the back to check out if his buddy is back there.
Cathleen Nardi adds the rabbit hole we last talked about.
Dec 06, 2013
In participation with the DS106 GIFaChrome final project Rochelle Lockridge adds a white rabbit popping out of the hole and turns it into a GIFaKidChrome image.
Oh boy… did I have fun with the DS106 Daily Create tdc671. We were to make a poster for a new DS106 ad campaign, ‘got ds106?’, based on the ‘got milk?’ milk industry campaign started back in 1993. [Wikipedia article]. I created the DS106 DesignAssignment1234 to share the fun with future DS106ers.
Super Hero Alan Levine assuring us DS106 helps build creativity that soars.
I did a quick search of Google Images for ‘got milk?’ posters and had a plethora of great images pop up. I was immediately drawn to the Superman poster. Employing the Google once again I located the Phoenix American font used for the original campaign. The link will take you to a free downloadable non-licensed version.
I deleted the original text, then copied a section of the remaining blue sky to paste and stretch to fill the empty space. Using the newly downloaded Phoenix American font I changed a few words to customize it for our ‘got ds106?’ campaign.
Super.
That’s how milk DS106 makes you feel.
The calcium fun helps bones creativity grow strong,
so even if you’re not from Krypton Strawberry, AZ
you can have bones of steel creativity that soars.
got milk DS106?
I could’ve just replaced the text , but what would be the fun and challenge in that?
Alan Levine
Photoshopping Alan (a ds106 instructor at Cogdog Blog) Levine’s head onto Superman’s body was a must, and turned out to be much simpler than I thought it would be. (These techniques are “simple” now, but it’s taken lots of practice and perseverance to learn them.) Choosing a good picture with the right composition was important. I wanted him to be facing to the left and tilted similarly to Superman’s. It didn’t take me but a few minutes to find a nice photo with another Google Image search, this time for Alan Levine. Amazingly, the lighting was even a close match. How lucky was that?
Using the quick selection tool in Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 for the Mac, I selected and deleted everything but Alan’s head, neck and hat. (I thought the hat added another layer of giggle-able absurdity to the mashed image.) Another bit of serendipity was that Alan’s brown jacket blended well with Superman’s cape. Yippeee! But I needed to do a little rebuilding of the top of his hat since it was cropped in the photo. This required copying a piece of it from the top, duplicating it a couple of times, reducing the size to align these little ridges on his hat, and then erasing the outside edges of each layer to produce a rounded head effect. I merged all of the layers and used the clone tool to blend them. His neck was a little trickier. I started with the Spot Healing Brush, then found two new tools today, Smudge and Blur. I was quite pleased with the results. As a finishing touch I used the blur tool again around the edges of his hat and face to give a more blended effect against the sky.
The DS chest plate was pretty simple too. I used the clone tool to erase the “S”, and produce a blank yellow background in the process. Then cut out a “DS” from the DS106 logo. By adjusting the hue and saturation of the DS layer I was able to approximate the red color of the original “S”. Resizing and transforming the layer with the skew and distortion effects was employed. And the final adjustment was to reduce the opacity just a tad.
After I uploaded the new poster to flickr I noticed that Superman’s belt also has an “S” on it. Ooops….. Oh well… it’s not about being perfect here in DS106. It’s about the creating, trying, learning, and giving it your best…. wherever you’re at.
UPDATE November 24, 2013
Superhero Alan Levine has been GIFfed!
DS106 Superhero Alan Levine has creativity that soars!
This project all started because I was playing around with a new app, PIP Camera. You know how one thing leads to another in DS106.
=> It’s time for DS106 video weeks. YAY! My favorite digital storytelling medium.
=> I wanted to see what the Picture in Picture app could do.
=> As anyone knows who follows my projects, I have plenty of digital media of my grandson. And I’m not afraid to use it. 🙂
=> Nana’s Nightstand was born.
More often than not a family photo montage is interesting to the family being featured, but not so for everyone else. Some of you may be old enough to still remember being made to sit through a meandering slide show of a relative’s family vacation. BORING! I’m a bit weird in that I’m one of those strange people who actually likes to look at other people’s pictures. I think that’s because I enjoy looking for and learning about the story within the images.
In DS106 we are learning not just how to create with digital media techniques, but how to tell an engaging story. In the making of Nana’s Nightstand I tried to do just that. My choices for photos are based on my feelings that each can tell a story that can be inquired into and shared beyond my little family unit.
Not much story beyond “Cute Baby”
Sure I had lots of images to choose from that I really liked. Many were nice photos, just not very interesting. A dozen pictures of a happy baby face is cute for the first few. But after that, who cares except for Nana, Mom & Dad. I also had the criteria that each of these would be a photo I’d have put in a frame at my bedside, in my office, as a screen saver, or in a special photo folder on my cellphone. They had to stand out to me and hopefully be captivating to another viewer.
A few of the stories that could use a little more fleshing out…
The opening image is of me on my birthday holding DJ and he’s only 20 days old. If you look closely you’ll see that he’s holding onto my finger too. Awwww…….
Daddies are great!
At 0:40 this may look like just a happy baby face, which you aren’t bored with yet since it’s early in the video, but there is indeed a story behind it – the bib: “Daddy Loves Me”. DJ’s daddy, Michael, is the primary caregiver, the stay-at-home dad. This photo is then followed by DJ touching a painted heron on the wall of his nursery that Michael painted.
At 1:37 DJ is in the midst of eating his first birthday cake. I had wanted to place the animated GIF of him licking the good stuff off of his 2nd birthday candle immediately following so you’d really get what was going on, but that didn’t fit the linear journey through time story arc. (You did notice the ticking clock GIF on the nightstand throughout the video, right? The minute hand is even moving at a real clock speed until the credit roll. You can read below a quick summary of how I made that happen, with a more thorough production post to come.)
At 4:16 DJ is looking at the camera smiling with his tongue sticking out a bit. If you could see the whole thing his shirt says “Little Guy, Big Temper” – perfect for a little guy just over two years old. And the tongue thing? We were playing with my iPhone, taking pictures of him on the back porch. (I think he may’ve even taken this shot.) I’ve noticed him sticking out his tongue lately when he’s concentrating on a task at hand.
Did DJ inherit the tongue thing from Nana?
I couldn’t figure out where he picked it up. Of course I assumed it was one of his parents. But no….. While going through choosing the images I’d use for this video, lo-and-behold, I found the culprit. It’s <gasp> Nana! I’d never noticed myself doing that before. Did he inherit it from me? Or maybe I picked it up from him?
I play guitar just like Nana.
At 4:24 DJ is sitting in his wagon, which could be an interesting story in and of itself. But look closer and you’ll notice that his jacket has a guitar on it. Nana plays 12-string guitar and he’s recently started picking up the wooden bellows by the fireplace pretending it’s a guitar. He also has an inflatable pink electric guitar he likes to play with.
Eating Mommy’s Brain
At 4:38 DJ is munching on… get ready for it… a plastic brain. His Mom works in a neuroscience lab and is applying for grad school right now. This is a teaching aid model of a real brain she brought home that you can open up with the parts labeled. (As a side note, my daughters played with molecular model sets like most kids play with Tinker Toys while growing up. Mixing of work with life is definitely a theme for me.
Home Screen Uffda
The final image at 4:52 of DJ in his Uffda! red shirt is currently my cellphone lock screen. While one might assume this is just a Nana favored terrific toddler pic, there is more. UFFDA! is heard uttered by Minnesota natives where we live. While other upper mid-west states use this phrase, to me it signifies being home in Minnesota. In all honesty, there are a few photos in the montage I admit are there simply because I love them. After all, I’m the creator of this art piece and the power of the editing lays in my hands.
Remember at the top of my post talking about how one thing leads to another? While wandering around the Picture In Picture app I found a frame that was sitting on a bedside table amongst the many options the app provides. This led me to thinking about the photo of John Johnston’s grandfather that he talks about sitting on his Gran’s and later his mum’s sideboard in the DS106 Radio piece we produced a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t resist making an image for him. And while I was at it I made some for Seth Goodman too. (Our fellow radio show collaborator @GoodmanSeth Twitter) And guess what? When Seth received the photos he wrote back that his mom had just come out of a planned surgery and he was looking forward to showing them to her when she came out of the anesthesia. You can see all of the PIP images at the end of my radio show blog post, “Spinning Yarns for DS106 Radio”.
THE PROCESS
The process to create this video required quite a bit of fiddling around with different platforms, media, editing programs, etc. The original photos were dispersed amongst four different sites: my iPhone, iPad, computer, and a shared drive on my website. Once I found what I was looking for, which was no easy task, using the Photo Transfer App I was able to easily download everything I needed onto my iPad which I found had the best user interface to make the picture in picture images. Once the framed images were created I uploaded them to my computer and imported them into Adobe Premiere Elements 12 for the Mac OS. The final PIP images all have the same background. So when you place them one after the other it looks like only the photo inside the frame is changing. The film dissolve transition worked well with this effect.
I’ve made a lot of these types of video montages before. But this time, after going through week 10 with the DS106 making of movies material, I was more aware of the point of interest in the images and where my eyes were drawn to. It seemed I was drawn to DJ’s eyes and face most of the time. I watched the video carefully and noticed that in some spots I was moving up and down and up and down and it was a bit disorienting. I decided to change the order or even replace some of the photos to create a more relaxed visual experience.
MAKING GIF TIME
There’ve been comments about the thoroughness of some of my posts when it comes to sharing my production notes. Since I do a lot of my learning by trial-and-error, it’s mostly about me wanting to capture in writing what I actually did to create something so that I can do it again next time. [Tiptoeing Through HTML] That’s certainly the case here. Making the animated clock GIF and getting it to all work well in the final video was rather complicated. I’ve decided not to include it in this post. But for me and others who are curious and want to learn how I did it, I’m in the process of creating a separate post to capture it all.
The short version:
Found an animated clock GIF on-line
Used Photoshop to copy out the clock faces from each layer
Made a new GIF with a transparent background
Overlayed the new clock face GIF into the video
Below is a screen shot of my Adobe Premiere Elements 12 video editor tracks. Starting from bottom to top …
Audio soundtracks
PIP Images
New clock face GIF
Animated GIF of DJ licking his 2nd birthday candle + Text for “Yum Brains”
Template files for download and use in your projects: Clock GIF with 25 frames that when held for 2.41 seconds each they produce a one minute GIF. [Photoshop PSD file]
The blue background inside the frame will allow you to use the video merge blue screen effects in more advanced video editing software.
Yesterday’s ds106 daily create tdc644 was all about capturing an image of a dog. Although the suggestion was to either take a picture or to draw one and take a picture of that, I figured since I have the digital media already hanging out on my computer, why not go a step further and share my little doggie Abby on video and throw in a new GIF for good measure.
She’s such a media diva. Or is it that I’m the digital media diva and she’s just an unwilling subject of my creative endeavors? But then how would you explain how she’s annoyingly tried to insert herself into a couple of my projects? [The making of the Obruni podcasts on the Scott Lo LoDown summer of 2013 and the Headless ’13 week 4 audio reviews.] Which subsequently required the editing out of her attempts to “audio bomb” my projects. I’ll think I’ll leave those bits and pieces for an audio out-take reel if I ever decide to make one.
You haven’t seen much of me the last couple of weeks, but it’s all good. I’ve been busy applying DS106 to my income producing job at 3M. Because of what I’ve learned over the last few months, some directly from the CogDog himself, Alan Levine behind the scenes, some from the DS106 course work, some from other on-line participants, I have been able to incorporate several new digital communication tools like Storify, Twitter, blogging, WordPress, HTML and GIFs to increase my effectiveness as a business opportunity and technology analyst. Here I was thinking I was “goofing-off” and having too much fun with my DS106 obsession. Then wham… the week before I leave for my annual fall meditation retreat up in the Rocky Mountains everything falls into place.
My boss likes what I can do with Storify and has given me permission to try out the business level subscription for a couple of months.
I built a new WordPress website in just two days that will provide an excellent user interface and location for me to organize the company analysis information I gather for my business group, Energy and Electronics, at 3M.
I’m establishing a new external on-line presence as Rochelle Lockridge the professional 3M employee: (@rllockridge Twitter handle) which is separate from my personal digital presence as Rockylou. RLLockridge@mmm.com will be keeping up-to-date on what’s happening with the technologies and companies she needs to follow.
Without this course and the people who make it what it is, I never would have been able to do all of this. Everything has come at the right time, with the right people showing up in my life, when I didn’t even know I could benefit from this kind of help. I’m glad that I read about DS106 while studying about MOOCs for a 3M project and got in touch with Alan Levine. The rest is history. 🙂
So that brings me to the present and moving into the future. I’m in the process of co-organizing a final project for the 3M-DS106 Salon around collaboratively creating a video documentary (for lack of a better term) that shares our experiences and projects that we will then post to YouTube. The group has lost momentum over the last few weeks as the greater DS106 community was working on audio. This will perk them back up. And I’m hoping even some of the 3M “lurkers”, as we’ve been calling them, get involved too.
My plans are to ask them what else they want to learn about and practice with respect to digital communication tools and our internal social platforms, and then build that into the way we create the video. We will most likely be using many of the same sorts of collaboration tools we used during the making of the DS106 radio programs- like Google Docs, Google Hangouts, Skype, Twitter – but with our internal 3M versions of the tools: share drives, Level 3 Global Crossing, SPARK, IBM Connections Communities. It might be fun to have a few other DS106ers who’ve been following my little experiment and have been commenting to participate in some way too. Maybe creating a video clip or doing a recorded Skype “interview” with me that we can include. If you’re interested contact me.
If this goes well, it will be made public and it might be of value as an introductory tool for others who plan to be working with industry “inside the firewall”. Or perhaps as supporting data if you need to show your school administrators why the skills taught in DS106 are relevant when your students graduate and enter the business world.
DS106 has made a significant impact in my life that makes me want to share it with others. This is yet another way to do that. Oh… by the way… I do plan to keep the 3M-DS106 Salon open and run this again. Hopefully with another external course going on, but will do it on my own if need be.
To get practice in basic video sequencing, locate at least two smaller portions within these clips that demonstrate the points you made in your analysis above. We want you to put these scenes together in a short montage, sequencing them together so that you get some basic experience with video editing.
I was drawn to snippets of the dialogue that I felt I could string together to have them talking about the chaos we experience and the perplexing situation we have trying to tell someone else what DS106 is all about.
For my video editing software I used Adobe Premiere Elements 12. Making the clip transitions cleanly from one to the other took a bit of fiddling around by shortening and lengthening the clips so that I didn’t have massive jumps between shots that looked out of place. At about 20 sec in there’s one cut that didn’t quite work right. The rest I’m pretty satisfied with. I really had a chance to see and understand how the cuts from one character to another or one scene to another are made as I put this together.
The audio went pretty smoothly. There were two spots where I wanted to dub in “DS106” – one with Neo and one for Morpheus. It helped that my voice at the moment is pretty low due to a cold, but I’m not really satisfied with the quality of the dubbing job. I opted to let it go since I didn’t want to work that hard to make it “perfect”. I know I could’ve taken the audio into GarageBand and played around with effects and stuff, but it was good enough this time around. Personally I think it’s funnier that it stands out as being dubbed anyway.
The DS106 logo overlay onto the elevator was created with the addition of a .png formatted still image onto a new layer above the video track. Reducing the opacity down to 70% made it look more realistic. Finding the location to place the logo was the hardest part. I had to look for a somewhat logical spot in the video that had a stationary image for at least 5 seconds. Above the elevator worked fine. The logo had to be resized initially, but no zooming or tracking was required. Both a white and a black version of the logo are attached below for others to download and use in their projects.
“There’s so much that happens in life. Little stories, big stories. Things that were no story and all the sudden you realize the significance of it. And that there really is a story there. But at the time you don’t know it. And for a long time you don’t know there’s a story. Until something clicks, and you tie that event together with something else that makes it a story. And that’s the beauty of life. You just go from one story to another.” – Seth’s Mom, Karen
The JunioRS Radio Show Poster: Created by Seth Goodman
It all started with John’s description of a theme he wanted to explore that intrigued me so I added my name to his radio show group.
Thinking of stories with little narrative, without conclusions, that put a picture in your mind. Perhaps stories from your family, your people with little detail… Perhaps some other idea.
With the use of a shared Google Doc we started brainstorming our ideas. All of us were well aware and expected the final product to be something different than what we started with, and it was. Although the original theme of using story snippets to put a picture in your mind, and exploring whether stories needed a beginning, middle and end remained. There was also this unique concept we threw into the mix of exploring, for lack of a better phrase, an Audio GIF: A repeating audio phrase that highlighted the essence of a piece.
During our first Skype call we brainstormed more, throwing around ideas of a room full of voices where one voice or story would come to the forefront then fade away as another faded in. I could see how this might work, but wasn’t clear how it would actually unfold. I knew if I had some raw material to work with something would emerge. We each uploaded a few files to our shared dropbox, and even though we hadn’t decided on how to divvy up the workload, or even what we were going to do yet, I took a stab at editing the pieces together using GarageBand ’09. I thought it would give us a good place to start when we had our next call.
The background music came about because John had listened to my first live DS106 Radio broadcast and had commented that he couldn’t get RnA’s (Rochelle and Amber Lockridge) rendition of “Comes A Time” out of his head. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, it lent itself well to our Audio GIF experiment. Not only is it being sung, but our speaking voices are layered in as well. Additionally, since I had recorded and engineered the original song I had the individual tracks available to mix and match if wanted. By underlaying only the guitar on certain segments I was able to reinforce the importance of one section over another.
THE RAW AUDIO
John & Gran
Upon listening it was obvious that each of us was coming at this in a different way. Seth had interviewed his mother about family stories, John shared glimpses of stories, and I had told two stories about my daughter as if I were telling them to my grandson. This presented a creative challenge. John’s segments were short, I could use them as is. Mine were also relatively short. Seth’s interview, however, was about 15 minutes long, (See media player below to listen to the full length interview.) and we were shooting for the entire piece to be 15 minutes.
SOUND EDITING BEGINS
Seth’s Mom & sister Miryom
I wasn’t certain how I would tackle the editing of Seth’s interview with his mom. I could go through it minute by minute and add notes for each segment, then with my analytical mind pick out which parts I wanted to work with. But I didn’t find that process very appealing right then. I opted instead to lift out the parts that I felt attracted to – no rhyme or reason to it. If I liked it, I split that section out and copied it to another layer. I don’t know why I was attracted to one segment over another. I just was. When I finished I was left with about 5 minutes of the interview that I thought I might like to use. Then I started pulling it together. Mind you, I hadn’t checked any of this out with John or Seth. I just thought I’d play around with stuff and see what happened.
There comes a time when memory fades. The backdrop gets blurred. Are we remembering or recalling our own retelling? Or perhaps our stories are simplifying, clarifying or crystallizing around an image. – John Johnston
Jenny & The Christmas Tree
I began grouping the segments together to have a “logical” flow to the piece. As I worked an arc of a story began to emerge. Much the same as what happened during my Bygone Backyard Photo Safari. The music flowed in and out easily, and segments magically aligned (with minimal tweaking) to have logical ending points as the song ended. The “process” continued to be very intuitive. But the amount of work I put into “playing around” was way more than I had expected to put into a rough draft. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when John & Seth were pleased with my “draft”. It was a go!
AUDIO QUALITY ISSUES
We had some audio quality issues which had to be addressed such as different audio recording quality, volume levels, etc. We hadn’t expected to use these initial files. We were basically throwing things at the wall initially to see what would stick. And now most of it was sticking. The interview with Seth’s mother would have to be used as is. We couldn’t redo that. So when I needed to add more volume I simply doubled the tracks. It worked fine. For John’s pieces we really did need to have them re-recorded with more volume. We ran into a snag there as he had a newer version of GarageBand (11 vs 9) and I wasn’t able to open his files. After beating my head against a wall thinking there was something wrong with the drop box and my access, I finally just broke down and paid the $15 for the upgrade and everything was “fixed” immediately.
My skill as a sound engineer, mixing and mastering, are continuing to develop. I’m quite familiar with layering and adjusting the volume levels and placement of sounds on the timeline, etc. My post on the Obruni Arrives in Africa Sound Effect Story is a good example. This one, however, presented an unexpected challenge that required more “futzing” around than usual. I expect that most people will be listening to our show on their computer or mobile device. So relying on the quality of sound from mixing while simply listening through good quality headphones would be insufficient.
I needed to adjust the EQ and effects to optimize the audio experience across several platforms: Computer, computer speakers, headphones, tiny cheap radio speakers, iPhone/iPod. Adjusting the volume of the music soundtrack was especially tricky. On one set of speakers I could hear it just fine, another it was too low.
I also added a new tool to my sound engineering arsenal, Ozone 5. A professional sound mastering software package that I picked up following a GarageBand sound editing class at my local Guitar Center. While this optimization process was very time consuming. It was well worth it in the end. When I myself enjoy listening or viewing one of my projects over and over again, I know I’ve got something there.
I can tell you…. after all of the work I didn’t like having to reduce the quality to save it as 128K. It about broke my heart, but those are the sacrifices one still has to make so that the piece can stream over the internet and download more easily.
I hope you enjoy listening to our show as much as we enjoyed creating it.
(Note: If you felt your audio experience was less than optimal listening to us spin our tales, try another listening mode. I’d even recommend you doing that anyway so you can hear for yourself what a difference it makes. Someday I hope to learn how to make these adjustments with learned skills instead of with trial and error.)
SUPPORTING AUDIO FILES
UPDATE: 10/26/13 addition of pre & post show live discussion on DS106 Radio 10/22/13 US premiere
